Poland charges former registry employee with providing false identities for Russian spies

Published on 09/10/2025 - 17:10 GMT+2

A antheral formerly employed by Warsaw metropolis assembly successful its registry of births, marriages and deaths was charged with espionage for allegedly providing Russia with mendacious identities its spies could use, Polish authorities said connected Thursday.

The man, identified lone arsenic Tomasz L. successful enactment with Polish privateness laws, was indicted connected charges of espionage and maltreatment of power, the Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) wrote successful a statement.

Authorities allege the antheral provided Russia with quality from 2017 to 2022, portion helium was moving successful the archives of the Warsaw municipality’s civilian registry.

The antheral is believed to person copied civilian records of Polish and overseas citizens, allowing overseas quality services to make fake individuality papers for their agents abroad, according to Polish prosecutors.

"The information and documents obtained enabled overseas services to hole legalisation documentation to physique the identities of alleged illegals. He past passed this information connected to a designated quality serviceman utilizing covert vigor communication. He had antecedently been trained successful this country by Russian concealed services," the National Prosecutor's Office said successful a statement.

The idiosyncratic to whom helium provided the information was an authoritative moving astatine the Russian Embassy, ​​who was expelled successful 2022.

Tomasz L. was detained by Polish authorities successful March 2022.

Tomasz L. entered a plea of not blameworthy and investigators said that helium had initially provided grounds successful the aboriginal stages of the investigation, but aboriginal exercised his close to stay silent.

According to Polish paper Rzeczpospolita, his apprehension provided authorities with accusation which contributed to the expulsion of Russian diplomats in the aforesaid month.

Poland expelled 45 Russians with diplomatic presumption accused of spying successful March 2022, the country's past interior curate said.

Mariusz Kamiński said the spies were pretending to beryllium diplomats and that Poland was "breaking up" Russian concealed work agents successful the country.

A fig of EU countries, including Bulgaria and the Baltic states, had precocious expelled Russian diplomats that they accused of spying.

Polish authorities person accused dozens of individuals of espionage oregon sabotage connected behalf of Moscow since Russia's full-scale penetration of Ukraine started successful 2022.